Excerpted from “Witness to an
Extreme Century” by Robert Jay Lifton. Copyright 2011 by Robert Jay
Lifton. Excerpted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon &
Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton, in his memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century,”
interviews Albert Speer about his 15 years as a prominent Nazi and
“Hitler’s architect.”
Three
of our four meetings took place at his home on the outskirts of
Heidelberg, and the fourth at his isolated retreat in southern Bavaria.
His Heidelberg home seemed isolated enough, high in the hills behind
the city’s famous castle. I remember the house seeming cavernous, its
furnishings neither attractive nor cozy. Speer himself was welcoming
but I was struck by how old he looked (he was then seventy-three), by
the awkwardness of his movements (he had considerable difficulty getting
up and sitting down, leading me to wonder whether he had Parkinson’s
disease), and by his “thousand-mile stare” (the term we used to describe
the psychological remoteness in repatriated American prisoners of war
in Korea in 1953). The word I used to characterize his general demeanor
was weary (though I should add that a little more than a year
later he was to be enlivened by a passionate love affair with a younger
woman).
Speer was interested in talking
to me, and made clear that nothing he said was confidential. But he
quickly suggested an agenda of his own centered on his bond with
Hitler. He told me how he had heard the Nazi leader speak at his
university in Berlin in 1930, was “really spellbound” at the time and
remained so for the next fifteen years covering the entire Nazi era.
His question for me was how, in retrospect, he could have been so
enthralled by such a man. He then made a startling proposal: that he
undergo psychotherapy with me in order to better understand how that had
happened. The strong implication was that the relationship still had a
hold on him, from which he wanted to extricate himself. I was much
interested in hearing more about his conflict but had no wish to take on
responsibility for his psyche. I needed my freedom as a researcher and
did not see my task as one of easing the pain of a prominent former
Nazi. Nor did I wish to have our meetings structured around his way of
framing his problem. So I suggested instead that we explore in some
detail his relationship with Hitler without my becoming his therapist.
Speer agreed and we did so, but we were able to explore much else that
enabled me to relate this strange bond to larger questions of evil and
knowledge of evil, and of death and immortality.
Speer
explained that the speech that had so moved him was Hitler’s relatively
intellectual and historical treatment of German history, as opposed to
his more demagogic, rabble-rousing street version. The narrative was
one of revitalization: now Germany is weak and everything seems hopeless
but by uniting behind Hitler and the National Socialist movement – and
above all renouncing the guilt for World War I assigned by the
Versailles Treaty – Germany and its people can once again be strong.
Speer was then a twenty-five-year-old instructor in architecture in a
collapsed economy and he and others around him were experiencing only
despair about their future. Images of … humiliated German troops
returning from World War I twelve years earlier were still fresh in his
mind, as were postwar scenes of every kind of social chaos. Hitler’s
words were for him transformative, a message of new hope and a promise,
as he put it, that “all can be changed” and “everything is possible.”
Feeling “drunk from the talk,” Speer walked for hours through the woods
outside Berlin, seeking to absorb what he had heard. He was in the
process of experiencing a secular form of a classical religious
conversion, described by William James as “perceiving truths not known
before” that enable a “sick soul” to “give itself over to a new life.”
Intense “self-surrender” is accompanied by new spiritual strength.
Speer demonstrated the emerging power of the combination of national and personal revitalization, which I came to see as the psychological core of Nazi appeal throughout the German population.
Speer
joined the Nazi Party soon after that speech and told me of his rapid
rise within tis circles, first as an enthusiastic party worker and then
as an architect. From his sensational early success in designing the
light and space for the large Nuremberg rallies, beginning in 1933 (as
depicted by Leni Riefenstahl in her film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will),
he progressed to the planning of vast buildings, even cities, to extol
the omnipotent Nazi regime and, above all, its Fuhrer. He emphasized
how, in becoming “Hitler’s architect,” he was drawn toward a vision of
personal immortalization, of “having a place in future history books,”
“building for eternity,” and becoming in that way “someone who is
surviving his own life.” The sense of immortality, which I emphasize in
my work, intoxicated Speer to the point of becoming something close to a
promise of literally living forever. So grandiose were the projections
he and Hitler made together that some of the buildings were to hold as
many as 150,000 people on vast balconies in a new Berlin that would
become the center of the world, dwarfing the grandeur of Paris and the
Champs-Elysees. Few of the structures were actually built but many were
imagined, as part of what Speer called “a daydream that was a very
serious daydream.”
On one of my visits to the Heidelberg home, he showed me a large glossy book that had just been published, titled Architecture of the Third Reich.
It contained gaudy photographs of buildings I noted to be “profoundly
vulgar” and “totalitarian,” and Speer seemed initially to share that
judgment: “I admit that the proportions are all wrong,” he said, and “I
criticize the grandiose side.” Then, without the slightest trace of
irony, he added, “But of course it was what the client wanted.” He
attributed all excess to that “client,” but he could hardly dissociate
himself from the grandiosity involved. Indeed, his pride in the volume
was clear enough as he clutched it affectionately and pointed also to
pictures of rally sites he had designed: “I was one of the first to use
light in nighttime as a device for creating space. The searchlights
came so high that when you were standing inside you saw it as being in
the stratosphere.” He did not say that his innovative lighting enabled
the Fuhrer to be seen as descending from the heavens. I thought of
Speer’s overall contribution to the mystical appeal of the Nazi
movement, converting Nazi darkness into a manipulated sense of
illumination. Witnessing his enthusiasm for that early work and his
nostalgic pride in projections of architectural world domination, I felt
that whatever sympathy I had for Speer was dissolving. It occurred to
me that Nazi architectural hubris had a certain parallel to its
biological hubris: apocalyptic architecture followed upon apocalyptic
biology.
Speer made it clear that Hitler
was more than a mere client: he was the closest of collaborators.
Hitler was not only a constant critic and appreciator of Speer’s
architectural suggestions; the Fuhrer became himself an architect and
even provided sketches of his own. As they imagined the unprecedented
grandeur of buildings, highways, archways, and cities, their thoughts
blended to the degree that it became unclear who had provided the
original idea. The two men shared this descent into a version of
apocalyptic fantasy: they were re-creating a perfect Nazi world from the
ruins of what they were destroying. It is this merger in fantasy that
constituted their architectural folie a deux.
Yet
however superior Speer’s knowledge of architecture, Hitler remained the
guru. As Speer put it, “I was so much in that ambience that I was
infiltrated with [Hitler’s] ideas without realizing how much I was
infiltrated.” He said that even now, when working on his writing, he
frequently has the experience in which “I see that it’s an idea Hitler
had in some way” and “I’m quite astonished.” In their particular
fashion, the two men formed a close personal relationship. Speer would
later write that if Hitler were capable of having a friend, he, Speer,
would have been that friend. But gurus, especially the most paranoid
and destructive among them, do not have friends; they have only
disciples. Speer believed that Hitler was drawn to him as a fellow
artist, and that appreciation worked both ways: “For an artist to see
somebody at the head of the state who is something of an artist too …
has a gift of excitement. Being overwhelmed by … a Wagner performance
or a ballet in Nuremberg, this for me was a strong, positive
influence.” They also shared an intense theatricality – Speer with his
dazzling night-lighting of rallies, and Hitler, whose “whole life,”
Speer told me, “was acting, performance, theatre.”
Speer’s
merging with Hitler resembled the kind of fusion of guru and disciple
that I encountered in studying fanatical religious cults, notably Aum
Shinrikyo in Japan in the nineties. But with Speer and Hitler the
fusion involved the shared hubris of a perceived artistic and structural
project to transform the world. In that way Speer was probably, at
least for a period of time, the disciple most important to Hitler in
affirming his omnipotent guruism. But Speer also provides for us a kind
of window to more ordinary German people who also experienced fusion
with a guru/leader rendered godlike. As Speer poured out details of his
interaction with the Fuhrer, I could be there with the two men at
various levels: observing them pore over their architectural plans as
“friends” and “colleagues”; and imagining their fusion in a version of
architectural madness perceived as an all-consuming gift to the world.
And here was this man sitting opposite me describing quite rationally
and methodically this most bizarre expression of evil from his past –
wishing to separate himself from it and renounce it, but not entirely.
No wonder that Speer was so difficult for me to grasp.
An
important clue to his psychology was the anxiety he began to develop in
connection with his projections of grandiose building. As he explained
to me, he found himself as a young architect with little experience
thrust into a situation without rules or boundaries, one in which
“nothing is fixed.” He had no clear tradition or architectural group
that could guide and constrain him, so that professionally “I could do
what I wanted,” and despite Hitler’s support, “I was alone.” The
Fuhrer’s involvement, far from a steadying influence, obliterated limits
and took the fused duo more deeply into unmanageable architectural
fantasy. At some level of his mind, Speer perceived this gap between
the grandiosity of the shared vision and what could be called
architectural reality. He also had inner doubts about the quality of the
architecture, “fear as to whether it would stand [the judgment] of the
times, of how it would be acknowledged in future times.” Related to
that fear was his discomfort, as a highly educated upper-middle-class
intellectual, among the mostly crude members of the Nazi inner circle.
He
told me about experiencing two kinds of symptoms. The first took the
form of claustrophobia: in certain enclosed spaces, particularly when on
trains, he would feel anxious and would nearly pass out. On one
occasion the symptoms were sufficiently severe that there was talk of
stopping the train in order to get him to a hospital. The second set of
symptoms required no particular locale, and were those of acute anxiety
(or panic attack): he would experience a feeling of great pressure in
his chest and a terrified sense that he was dying. These two sets of
symptoms occurred only during his time of intense, unlimited
architectural dialogue with Hitler and what he called his accompanying
“burden.” In my work I have related such symptoms both to feeling too
much (the overwhelming anxiety) and too little (the numbing toward what
one could not allow oneself to be consciously aware of). Speer was
fending off his conflicts not only about his illegitimate architectural
freedom, but about his overall role in the Nazi regime. Something in
him began to doubt the Hitlerian vision of brutally remaking the world.
In
our discussions he tried to explain – or explain away – his problem
mainly in terms of his susceptibility to Hitler’s charisma. That
charisma was real enough but Speer would seem at times to hide behind it
in order to avoid the probing of still more difficult questions of his
own ethical responsibility. What I believe was involved in these
symptoms was his struggle against the realization of the fraudulence of
the Fuhrer’s larger vision, and of his own corruption personally and
professionally. His architectural folie a deux with the Fuhrer
epitomized the problem. As in the case of doctors at Auschwitz, Speer
could adapt sufficiently to diminish his anxiety and serve the regime,
in his case with high energy and intelligence. His symptoms contributed
to that adaptation by covering over existential truths, and then
disappeared when he ceased to be “Hitler’s architect” and became instead
minister for armaments. Nor did they reappear during his imprisonment
or the years following his release … .
In
keeping with my concerns about different forms of participation in
evil, I focused much of our discussion on Speer’s relationship to the
“Final Solution,” the Nazi program of systematic mass murder of the
Jews. Over the years he had claimed ignorance and uninvolvement, a
claim that seemed increasingly untenable, and toward the latter part of
his life he backtracked and admitted having sense that “something was
happening to the Jews,” without having wished to learn any more about
what that was. As evidence mounted against his earlier claims, many who
had been sympathetic to him became critical, including one of his
biographers, Gitta Sereny, who concluded that he was “living a lie.” In
order to explore the matter with him I pressed him on the sequence of
his attitude toward Jews and encounters with their suffering.
He
made clear to me that he was by no means immune to the anti-Semitism of
the time, resonated to it in Hitler’s early speech, resented “rich Jews
in furs” during times of economic deprivation, was critical of the
Jewish domination of the medical profession, and, more to the point, of
what he took to be the inordinate Jewish influence on German
architecture in determining who received commissions for buildings. As
he rose in the regime, Speer did not emphasize anti-Jewish ideas in
speeches or writings but blended with the existing ambiance, with an
anti-Semitism that was, as he put it, “standard” and “legalized” so that
“one felt at home in it.” He was aware of Hitler’s rage toward the
Jews, but the two men did not talk about the subject during their
architectural meditations, or later when they were preoccupied with
armaments. But he recalled … how the Fuhrer would, in small groups of
his inner circle, “Speak in that cold, slow voice in which he revealed
terrible decisions” and declare that he would “destroy the Jews.” Speer
even came to realize that doing so was a central motivation, Hitler’s
“engine.” The murderous “engine,” that is, did not interfere with
Speer’s fusion with his guru; indeed one could say that the fusion
required that he himself connect in someway with the engine.
Speer
admitted to me that he encountered considerable evidence of Nazi
brutality and Jewish pain: the suicide of a distinguished scientist his
family knew at the University of Heidelberg, a scene at a railroad
station in which a few hundred “miserable looking people” he knew to be
Jews were “loaded on trains to be taken from Germany,” and selective
tours of Nazi concentration camps in which he claimed to be convinced by
his manipulative hosts that the inmates were in reasonably good shape.
More damning, he told me of providing certain materials for the work
camp at Auschwitz in 1943 and having at the time “some insight into the
bad conditions of such camps.” But he insisted that the construction
materials were only for improving the facilities, and when I asked about
his knowledge of the rest of Auschwitz and its role in extermination,
he insisted sharply that “I knew nothing of the other.” I had never
before heard anyone claim in this way close knowledge of the slave labor
function of Auschwitz and ignorance of its function as a death camp.
(Nor did we discuss Speer’s early participation in removing Jews from
their Berlin homes and later suppression of that episode, or his
providing, as minister of armaments, slave labor to German industry.)
Speer
told me how he “pushed aside very quickly” all such matters, sensing
that dreadful things were happening to Jews but stopping short of fully
realizing what they were because “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want
to see it.” Very much at issue was his sense that confronting the truth
would have undermined his entire Nazi worldview and deepest life
commitments and required him “to admit that all this was for nothing,
that it wasn’t right.” At the end of our third interview I noted that
one had two choices with Speer: either one could believe that he was
consciously lying all along, or one could see him as involved in a
sustained inner struggle around the psychology of knowing and now
knowing. I favored the latter view. I thought he was “living a lie”
but that he had not experienced it as a lie. Because of his extreme
psychic numbing, he had ceased to feel almost anything of the
abuse and suffering of Jews. And because of his “derealization”
(emphasized by Mitscherlich in connection with Nazi behavior), he could
avoid experiencing his participation in the Holocaust as actual or
real. Speer could explore his participation in a regime he now
condemned but could never allow himself to experience the dimension of
guilt associated with its mass killing. Therefore, he could never allow
himself fully “to know.” His wish to focus exclusively on his
emotional bondage to Hitler – and with my help find a “cure” for it –
was an effort to psychologize his Nazi behavior in a way that avoided
ethical truths. None of this makes him any less culpable for what he
did and did not do, but it does help explain his contradictory
statements about what he knew.
Throughout,
I had been more critical of Speer and more reserved about his
“repentance” than had such people as Alexander Mitscherlich, George
Mosse (a scholar whom I knew and greatly respected), and Erich Fromm
(the well-known psychoanalyst who befriended Speer and expressed great
enthusiasm for his change). Still, I had conversed with him in a civil,
even friendly fashion, finding him at least at moments likable, and had
been impressed by the fact that someone so high in the regime was
making this kind of articulate turnabout – even if Hitler was always
there with us. I concluded that our interviews had revealed
extraordinary dimensions of enthusiasm and corruption, of complex
immersion in evil – and that to learn about all this I had no choice but
to sit in that room with him and his Fuhrer.
Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir
By Robert Jay Lifton
Free Press, 448 pages
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